egon schiele four trees

schiele's painting four trees draws the eye from the four trees to the sky. Schiele could have easily called this work four skys. his use of the rolling hills caresses the viewer into the third tree from the lest and immediately thereafter into the orange of the sky. the fourth tree from the left  as been unduly harmed by a stroke of transparency that casts the tree to the side even though it may be the largest and most bountiful. The gradualness of the sky encourages the viewer to take part in each layer, it instructs us at the same time as it encourages us not too look back at the ground or the trees. The moderate use of oranges in the lower sky is not abnormal and can be seen routinely in other artists work during this time period and to this day. what remains a mystery is schiele's use of transparency as noted above.

of future and men

i feel it necessary to defend my self. over the course of a dinner last night i rambled on about how the world was changing and what changes were on the horizon. perhaps i bored the hell out of my dinner companions. when i jump into these rabbit holes, i know not whether it was the blue or the red pill but i do know i am onto something. increasingly i see the literary world most at risk. i see newspapers and books fading off - being replaced by electronic denizen tabloids, blogs that run journalistic desks, discrete punch holes in the firewalls of pakistan, china, iran, iraq and afghanistan that pour raw data onto unknowing masses. these changes will forever punish the literary world for not reading the tea leaves earlier.

old newspaper ideologies will drive profit and sustainability into early graves. journalists who can take advantage of the new media flows that circle the globe constantly will become the new media players of our time.  what i have seen over my career in information is that most information is freely available and that it is in the interpretation that we often fail.

newspapers and magazines that copy their style and thinking in the electronic medium are doomed to fail. Research, source, write, release will be replaced by write, release, modify and modularize. by modularize i mean that your thoughts whence written will be changed into something different perhaps unlike your original intent. you will then need to capture what your ideas has become and make it your own and hopefully profit from it in the future. profit is not money profit is acumen and reverence.

i believe all media is at risk and i believe the way we receive information will undergo such a significant revolution that we will look back at information overload as merely a synapse misfiring. we are at the moment in our lives where we can not handle the entirety of the data that is available to us. however through advances in bio - computing and nanotechnology a new information frontier is near. these are not just disciplines that are only academic, companies have been formed and continue to be formed that will exploit bio computing and nanotechnology for good and for profit(note the difference)

do you have any thoughts germany

again on Egon Schiele

Every since I visited the Leopold Museum i have been fascinated with the work of Schiele. I bought a few books that described his life and inspirations, they also detailed his ailments. It would appear that all great painters and artists are afflicted with something that cuts their life short or makes it unbearable> I would like to think that most often it is because of the ailment that there are able to be so creative. What interests me most about Schiele is his depiction of death. be it trees or people he has an ability with death. Schiele details death as one witnesses the theater - a spectators. he does not allow us access only a glimpse. He is a master at detailing the obvious trust the subject has in death or the process of dying where many other contemporary painters expose death as merely a spectacle and one that should not be observed.

still searching

I am scouring the net looking for idealistic ways to embed videos on websites and allow people to post their own videos quickly to a site. It is the genesis for a business idea that I am working on. The most common method that i have been using is simply posting youtube videos, but i am addicted to how vimeo (http://vimeo.com) looks on a website. I discovered vimeo through the work of vincent moon a videographer. you need to see his stuff http://www.vincentmoon.com/

where are we going

I fell into the trap the other day and read 'the shack'. I read the 'davinci code' for the same reasons. it was popular and i just had to know what was going on- what was making people talk so much, what was driving them back to reading and away from television screens. I read the 'code' in a couple of days and read 'the shack' in a night. the only similarity between the two books was the ravenous appetite that was built up for the two books. the differences are a mile long, especially when you take into account the marketing machine behind teh two. one had a major motion picture studio, celebrity author, celebrity actor(is there another kind), money, money,money. The other published the book out of their garage and marketed the book through word of mouth. This is not twitter and facebook word of mouth either although that did pick up and yes Oprah picked it up to. I have to admit that there has only been two books promoted by Oprah that have crossed my desk. I was tricked into reading the Lovely Bones and then of course - the shack.

i am for obvious reasosn skirting over the religious questions that are posed and semi posed in the books. it strikes me that we in north america are in the midst of religious crises. North of the US border churches are for sale and south of the border it appears politics is in political crises . I do not know enough about the situation in the US but certainly up here every 5th church is for sale, attendence is down and money is very short. I wonder how much of an appetite we have for more religious paraphenilia writing.

just in time for fall